Conceited now means stuck-up, but if you’ve ever taken a literature course, you may have heard the noun conceit used to refer to an elaborate metaphor. Edmund Spenser’s late sixteenth-century epic poem, The Faerie Queene, for example, is not only full of conceits, but is itself a great big conceit. As such, it represents the founding of the grand empire, Britain, through its Tudor monarch, Queen Elizabeth I. Even today, you might hear a person in a normal conversation referring to the conceit of a book, movie, or TV show. The conceit of Breaking Bad—cooking and distributing meth by Walter White, one of the least likely figures imaginable—represents the capacity of anyone, no matter how virtuous in the past, to turn evil and callous. Even for a high school chemistry teacher just trying to look out for his family after he dies of lung cancer, criminal behavior can be habit-forming. [Read more…]

A colleague of mine uses an out-of-office email message that reads something like, “I shall be out of the office until Monday, October 14, and will respond then.” She’s a rare exception these days. Almost nobody distinguishes between shall and will anymore. In my own case, although I understand the difference, I’d feel too self-conscious and stuffy using shall correctly. That’s where contractions come in handy: if I write, “I’ll be out of the office until Monday, October 14 . . .,” I don’t have to deal with the now virtually extinct difference between shall and will. [Read more…]

Where you place the word only in a sentence can make the difference between being logical and seeming ridiculously illogical—that is, if you and your reader are paying attention. [Read more…]